Avoiding NaNoWriMo.

Because I can't write anything inspired right now, I figure I may as well write some drabble that no one will read. :D

I might as well explain my novel, yeah? I mean, I'm spending a month writing the shit out of it (and researching as I go, which is a whole 'nother story), so I feel I should at least try and explain WHY I'm writing it.

First of all, it's been a while since I read Hunger Games and I honestly didn't have Suzanne Collins in mind when I began writing the story of Daphne the Epic Bitchy Main Character. Not that I think Katniss is a bitch. She's sort of clueless, actually. But Daphne Watercress is despicable because she's the exact opposite of clueless and she uses every bit of information she gathers to manipulate people and get her way.

I've never written a character I didn't like. Not even my villains or antagonists were all that bad in my head because I understood them psychologically. So writing Daphne is a really strange experience. There's literally nothing I like about her. Except her best friend, Walker. Poor, poor Walker. Everyone loves him. I made him universally lovable on purpose so that when his heart breaks, the reader's heart breaks, too. And when he gets nommed on by a snake, the reader's right there with him writhing in the dirt while Daphne does her best to suck out the poison and fails. And when he gets sad about leaving his family behind, the reader's sad, too, even though they don't ever meet his family in the story.

It's a tragedy, really. I really wish Walker could be the one to change Daphne, and in the end he sort of is. But it's actually Logan--fabulously flawed Logan--who makes her realize how terrible she is. He's the one that silently pushes her to apologize for the first time in her life. How does he push her? By being just as HORRID as she is. Once she gets stuck with someone so much like her, she finally sees how big a bitch she is. It takes her a long time, but it does eventually happen. And when she tries to make things right, it's too late. Because, let's be realistic. I hate realistic endings, though (but I can't help but adore Sarah Dessen - damn her), so I designed it to be a little more governmentally twisted and somewhat hopeful. Sort of just like Mockingjay.

I apologize to Suzanne Collins for accidentally stealing your claim on bittersweet hope. Sort of.

So, basically, I didn't tell you anything about my story. Here's the main story line:
It hasn't rained for 30 years and the citizens of America have been split up over the country into tribes.
Daphne's mom gets married to the future leader of the tribe which gets Daphne pissed.
Daphne plans to run away with Walker once she discovers there's a city nearby.
The two of them embark on a long ass walk through desert, mountain and national park to get to Sacramento.
Walker gets holed up in the hospital and Daphne ditches him to go be a charity case foster kid to some middle class family after meeting Logan.
Walker gets out of the hospital and stalks Daphne until she's forced to talk to him.
Logan overhears them talking and "invites" them back to his place where a cornucopia of secrets is revealed.
Some shit happens and Walker decides to go on his own back to the tribe. Daphne goes with him and she brings Aunt Eadie back, but leaves Walker there.
More shit happens.
Three years pass and the government falls.
Daphne breaks up with Logan and returns to her tribe to try and convince them to move to the city. They chase her out of the camp.
She conspires to kill her baby half brother, but when she goes into the camp to do it, she's thrown into 'jail' and finds Logan already tied up there.
Walker helps them escape, gathers up his family and goes back to the city with Daphne and Logan.
All is well. Sort of.

That's the HIGHLY WATERED DOWN version. Go read my posts on Nicole's wall if you want the whole shebang. But it's only a little more informative than what I just gave you.

I don't think that really answered the "why" part of "why I'm writing this novel."
1. It's a challenge to write a character I despise.
2. It's a challenge to have every bad thing happen to the only good character in the whole story.
3. It's NaNoWriMo and when you only have 30 days to write 50,000 words, you fuckin' write whatever comes your way.
4. This is completely different from anything else I've ever written and I appreciate how unique it is (despite Hunger Games).
5. To be straight to the point, Urinetown inspired me to research Malthus and he fascinated me, the crazy old coot.

So there it is. It's called The After, but I really want to find a better name. It'll be stand alone, of course. And The After really works, but it just sounds so boring. =/

Oh well. I'll figure out the title when I finish it.

Happy NaNoWriMoing! :)

Trying Poetry...Again.

So, I don't read poetry, I don't write poetry, I don't really care about poetry. Ironically, the first piece I ever had published was a poem.

Something's been bothering me for over a month now and I couldn't figure out how to deal with it. Then, at 12:30 am yesterday, as I was trying to fall asleep in my boss's living room to the sound of a little boy crying, the first line of a poem popped into my head. (For the record, this poem is NOT about the crying little boy.) From there, everything else just fell into place in my head. I wrote it out as a prose poem last night before bed and revisited it today. I like it as prose poetry, but I liked it even better as poetry, so I broke it up, enjambed it to my liking, added concrete imagery and ended up with this:

Left Unsaid

Sometimes, I really
Can’t stand you.
Like when you relate everything
Back to sex.
Or how you never ask about
My opinions or thoughts.
My favorite position
On what issue?

Then I see you in person
And you’re attractive
With your ashy blonde hair and
Your whiter than eggshells smile.
You’ve got this scent,
Light as celery and
Prominent as peppermint.
You tease to make me laugh,
So I flirt
Because it’s easy.
I like to see you objectify me.
I like to twist you through my fingers
Until you can’t escape.
I like to think of you as my conquest.
Not yours.

You say I make you nervous,
That you can’t think straight around me.
You ask me
All the time
If I’ve forgotten you.
It’s how you start every
Conversation that ends pointlessly.
You say you really like me.
Which part of me?
You never said until
You got in my bed.

The immature part of me says
I should be happy
Because I won the
Battle of sexes.
The grown woman in me
Stays silent because
She feels nothing.
And neither do I.

No success or disappointment,
And no attachment to you.
Just emptiness and complete
Disinterest.
What goes left unsaid
Is why I bothered with you at all?
I have no answer.


As you can see, it needs some work. I got rid of the biggest cliches, but I've been trained to hunt down and eradicate every cliche in a piece of literature or poetry, so even things like the word "bothered" bothers me. And the ending stanza was a last minute addition that is VERY WEAK. Especially the last line. Gross.

Oh well. I'm gonna try and get my professors to help me with it (since I'm not in a poetry class where I could workshop it) and get it cleaned up in time to hand it into the Acorn Review (of which I'm an editor). I'd turn it in as is, but I'd rather have it down to minimal errors before the editing staff rips it to shreds in front of me. :P

Comments and constructive criticism is welcome! So is telling me I should stick to fiction writing - I know I'm no poet. :P

Finals Week?! Whaaaa?

It's amazing how lacking in drive I am right now. Finals start next week and I'm seriously considering skipping my anthropology test.

I've always been a fairly inconsistent student, but when you add a hatred for the school, the fifteen minute drive it takes to get to the school and the idiocy of the professors there waiting for me, it makes it really hard for me to find the will to get out of bed or to even hop in my car and go to class.

I'll fail anthropology even if I don't go to the final, but I might as well go and try to get myself a high F. Guitar's gonna murder me since I'm terrible with strumming patterns and switching chords. Creative Writing is the only class I feel I'll pass with flying colors. I wasn't always in attendance, but I worked my ass off on the assignments and it paid off. I'm now published and soon to be published again.

This tells me what I should do next semester: Stick with the English program.

I'm going to start private guitar lessons this summer (hopefully, if it doesn't cost too much with the added bonus of paying rent), so taking a class in the fall would be a waste of time and money (even though I adore Benedetti). Anth I'll just take again with a better teacher. Might as well.

English, however, will fill my schedule (hopefully). I know I want to take Novel Writing and the editing class (Acorn Review). I need one (maybe two) more three unit classes to be made full time and still have a little leeway if I decide to drop a class.

I have all of summer to figure it out.

But first, I need to start studying for finals.

Horror Stories

In grade school, there was this kid Eric. He was friends with everyone, but for some reason the popular kids thought he was awkward (when what’s really awkward is that the popular kids managed to be popular in a school with only 40 students). I don’t know where Eric is now, but I know he was in high school for 5 years. Anyway, I remember one year for English, we all had to write horror stories. Every story based on the students in class had a common theme: Eric’s death.
I wonder how he felt about that. I wonder if hearing his own death scene in ten different versions scarred him in an irreversible way. I wonder if I’m to blame for some of his bad childhood memories. I wonder if he even remembers that assignment.

New Leaves

On the subject of Teresa, there are some bright, magnanimous memories, and there are also some really terrible ones. For a little over a year, she was my best friend. Lucy and I weren't the closest of friends junior year and we remedied a good portion of that senior year, but it was Teresa that I bonded most with. Coco was there, too, but Reesa and I were together more often and Coco was busy with her romantic interests.

It's kind of funny how it all worked out. Reesa always saved time for her friends when she was dating Nick. I wasn't the biggest fan of him (and he turned into a giant d-bag once they were really, officially over), but he wasn't the most interesting person, so it was easy for her to divide up her time between him and friends and family.

At my "good riddance" party the day before I left for my 5 day roadtrip across the continental US, Coco cried when she said goodbye to me. I only cried when I said goodbye to Teresa, even though she was going the same way 19 days after me.

That was when everything changed. I didn't even know what was happening until it was all over.

I made all sorts of new friends and new best friends, and I did my best to keep my old friends, too. Maybe I changed. I don't really know. Maybe I was just adapting. Maybe that's what Teresa did, too.

Looking through the old "love" book we used to write in, I could see that we had interesting and at least semi-thoughtful conversations. Sometimes it was just funny stuff, or random stuff, but most of the time, it was stuff that really mattered to us.

At some point during our first year in college, those conversations stopped. When I wanted or needed to say something that mattered, she had to talk about boys. Or sex. Or how what's-his-face said such and such to her and how that made her want to drop her pants.

When I got back to this coast during the summer, I found out how often she'd lied to me to keep me from hating her or being disappointed in her. And honestly, if she'd just been up front about it, I would've been angry, but at least I would still have had some respect for her character.

Coco, Nelle and I confronted her about her behavior last summer, too. She promised to be different, and with her boyfriend on the east coast, she was different. She was herself. Or, well, one version of herself. I can't pretend I don't know how people edit their social selves to keep it separate from their alone selves. But either way, she was back to "normal" and we were all pretty happy about it. But in the back of our minds we knew, the moment she went back there, she'd just fall back into that new persona and probably get worse.

We were right.

At first, I only got a few texts from her, sometimes of pictures of her and Ty, or her new haircut, and the like. Then there was nothing. For about five months, there was complete silence. One day, I got a text from her saying she had a box in my grandparents' storage and could I please be her owl and let my grandparents know she wanted it back. I gave her my grandparents' number and told her to figure it out herself. After that, I didn't hear anything else from her until the day I announced on facebook that I was going back to PA for spring break. We talked a little about it, she brought up the storage thing again ('cause she just never got around to doing anything about it), and that was the end of it.

I was shocked, therefore, when I looked on facebook yesterday and discovered that she'd tagged me in a note titled "This is probably wayyy long overdue..." She addressed about 8 of us directly, and in the letter to me she said she knew what I thought had happened to our friendship.

It's not exactly hard to figure out. She dropped her dignity with her pants and I didn't bother to keep in contact. I would've just heard the same sex stories over and over again. Why bother?

Apparently, though, she's turning over a new leaf. Again.

I still love her, even if I have to think back to all the good times we had senior year to acknowledge it, but I can't help but wonder: How long will it last THIS time...?

Grass Is Greener

Wrote this the Wednesday night of my departure from Etown and it's taken this long for Blogger to stop being a giant bag of douche:

I cried again when I left. It was harder than the first time when I still held the belief that I would be back in just a few short months. It was so much harder to say goodbye while thinking of how I had no idea if I could ever come back. I don’t just mean for a visit, either. Visits just aren’t good enough. They aren’t good enough for me and they aren’t good enough for these people I’ve grown to call my “other family.” It feels wrong to just visit them. Like I’m just teasing. Like I’m not serious about it. Like I don’t think, at least once a day, how much I would do anything to go back and stay.
I wish I was exaggerating. I wish it wasn’t a constant longing. I wish I didn’t have to wake up every morning and realize that I’m in a bedroom, alone, in my parents’ house on the other side of the country from the room I should be in. The room that I shared with Elisabeth, that served as my home for a year, that contained so many memories and so much love and laughter. That is the room I should be in when I wake up every day. But it’s not.
And what’s holding me back? What on earth could keep me from the one place where I really, truly belong? It’s the same thing we all hear in news on a daily basis. If only we all had a little more money, everything would be better.
“The love of money is the root of all evil.” I’ve known this since I was old enough to sit and pay attention in Sunday school. I won’t lie, I love money. I love having it. Having money means freedom. I can buy whatever I want, go wherever I want, see whatever I want. Absolute freedom. Freedom comes with a cost, and it’s the everyday currency. It’s not lives or wars or peace treaties. When it all comes down to it, it’s money. Money, money, money. And let me tell you, if I had $50,000, there’s only one place I would be.
People ask me all the time how I ended up there. How could a girl, born and raised in San Diego, California, a city girl, choose to live in a place that is literally in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by dairy farms and the occasional McDonalds? When people ask me this it’s because they don’t get it. I mean, they ask me because they think it’s ridiculous. San Diego has near-perfect climate, four beaches within a thirty-mile radius, beautiful scenery and sunshine 52 weeks of the year. They honestly don’t get it.
They don’t get that San Diego is always the same. That the people are always the same, narrow-minded, judgmental people. That the streets are always the same. That the idiots are always the same. Don’t they get it? Don’t they understand what it’s like to be bored? Don’t they understand that the novelty of going to the same places and seeing all the same faces and driving all the same streets all the time wears off and becomes…boring? They may think cow towns are boring, but I have to disagree. Sure, you may have to drive a little further to find a mall or a good restaurant or a Wawa, but adventures happen on the way there. Yeah, you might get snowed in once or twice a year, but who doesn’t enjoy a little time off from studying to go play in the snow?
My point is, people may think San Diego is exciting, but I think having different adventures every day, on the road, in the dorms, around the town…all that is way more exciting. It requires imagination, patience and good humor. It requires people who are all vastly different, yet all equally good.
So is it really a ridiculous concept? Do you really need to ask me why I’m so desperate to come back?
I think the answer is fairly obvious. I suppose the grass may look greener on the other side, but, honey, I’ve been on both sides of the fence and I can tell you for certain that the grass is greener in Elizabethtown.

On Boobs and Why I Generally Hate Them

Okay, this has been bothering me for HOURS now, and I know I won't be able to sleep until I vent about it. I don't wanna do it over text, either, 'cause that'll take too effing long.

I'm going to touch on a couple different things here. I may have already ranted about the first one, but I don't care at the moment. I'm gonna do it again.

Listen up, boys. When I tell you I think your eyes are pretty, you don't fucking tell me my rack is pretty. You're talking about the bags of fat and glands I've had to carry around for eight years. I had to start wearing bras every day - uncomfortable bras. I had to wear sports bras whenever I was playing sports (which, for the record, I played year round starting in 8th grade, and from 3rd-7th grade I played during the school year). When I got into high school, I had to wear TWO sports bras when I played volleyball 'cause otherwise they'd get caught in the net if I got too close. These are the things that ache like migraines once a month. These are the things I've spent most of my life covering up because I don't like to look like a hooker. So don't fucking compliment my boobs.

And the last thing: If you're bitter about me moving on, you don't tell my BOSS you think I'm a slut who shows off her boobs too much. Um, excuse me? What the hell even prompted this? Especially since we happened to be in the same room as an exotic dancer with a boob job and low-cut shirt? For your information, I was wearing two shirts, one tank top and one v-neck shirt over it...TO AVOID SHOWING TOO MUCH CLEAVAGE. And the last time you saw me? Um, yeah, a spaghetti strap shirt underneath a purple boat neck top with minimal cleavage showing. The time before that? A long-sleeve shirt. Tonight? I Threadless shirt that went all the way up to my neck.

Don't go talking shit to my boss because you're sad the college girl you made out with once is no longer looking for a rebound and thinks you're creepy as hell. Go get a nose reduction, cretin.